London's Heathrow Airport is one of the world's busiest. That doesn't just mean that a lot of people will be passing through; it means that the airport must handle enormous quantities of baggage - about 270,000 pieces every day. Ideally, each bag will end up on the right plane every single time, day in and day out. Security concerns require that they luggage will not only be sorted and transported; it must be X-rayed as well. And in a baggage handling system that is running at full capacity, a failover in just one machine or system will be an enormous problem. Heathrow needs to be able to monitor the health and condition of every machine in the system, so that problems can be identified as they begin to develop and proactive maintenance can be done before failures occur. Downtime is not an option.

Solution

There are simple, measurable parameters that can be used to predict when a machine will need maintenance. Comparing things like temperature, vibration, and current use to historical readings will raise a red flag if the newer numbers exceed acceptable parameters. So a system integrator installed the Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform from Advantech B+B SmartWorx. The Wzzard platform creates a complete connectivity stack between sensors at the network edge and applications at the network care or in the cloud. It uses two pieces of IoT technology to do so; wireless Wzzard Intelligent Edge Nodes and the Spectre Network Gateway.

The Wzzard Intelligent Edge Nodes connect to new or pre-existing industry standard sensors, read their data and wirelessly transmit it to the Spectre Network Gateway. Every node has routing capabilities, so they are able to form extremely reliable, highly scalable, self-sustaining wireless mesh networks. Individual nodes need not to be within range of the gateway then provides secure network connectivity via either wired Ethernet or cellular data connection, with automatic failover.